"He had better never show his face again at any event we have anything to do with," said a member of Al Gore's team as the campaign's media centre was being slowly dismantled at the Sheraton hotel yesterday. "He cost us the presidency and he's never going to be forgiven for that."

As the disputed votes were being recounted in Florida, the Democrats were counting what they claim was the cost of the Nader factor. Ralph Nader won 97,000 votes in Florida, only 2% of the poll and far above the estimated 1,200 votes by which George W Bush had been leading at the time. Although he took only 3% of the poll nationally, if only half of his supporters had switched to Mr Gore, the vice-president would now be assembling his White House administration rather than catching up on sleep in a Nashville hotel.

"Ralph Nader denied Al Gore a clean victory," said the senate minority leader, Tom Daschle. His views were echoed by Democrats and Gore supporters throughout the country.

There is particular bitterness at Gore headquarters where Mr Nader was described as the grim reaper, "that bastard" and words that do not appear in the lexicon of political terms. Whenever he appeared with his trademark lopsided grin and crumpled suit on the television screens as the weary Gore team watched for more news of the Florida count, there were boos, groans and expletives.

Senator Joseph Biden, a Democrat, put it in more polite terms: "Ralph Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors. Nader cost us the election."

The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, which had hoped for a Gore victory because of his support for a woman's right to choose, is among many groups who believe that Mr Nader will pay a4 price for his candidacy. They accused him of a "cavalier" attitude to the issue. Harvey Weinstein, Democrat supporter and co-chairman of Miramax films, said that Mr Nader's name would "go down in infamy".

The Gore campaign team accept that not all Nader voters would have voted for Mr Gore if Mr Nader had not been running. Gore spokesman Doug Hattaway said Mr Nader had attracted three types of voter, those "disaffected with both the major parties, those who would have backed [Ross] Perot [the former Reform Party candidate] and ... those whose concerns are the right to choose and the environment". Not enough of the third category had shifted to Mr Gore on election day.

"His standing has been severely diminished by his actions," Amy Isaacs, the national director of Americans for Democratic Action, told the New York Times. "People basically view him as having been on a narcissistic, self-serving, Sancho Panza windmill-tilting excursion."

Among those in Nashville hoping to have been present for a Gore victory rally were members of the Greens for Gore campaign. They accused Mr Nader of having run a destructive campaign which would alienate his natural supporters and damage his efforts to build the Green party as a third force.

"Let the voters who said there's no difference between Bush and Gore wait until Big Oil's in the White House," said a spokesman for the Environmental Working Group. "Bush is going to take those Greens to school and we're all going to pay the tuition."

David Corn, Washington editor of the leftwing magazine The Nation, said: "A lot of people are looking to scapegoat Nader but that's fuzzy math. It means they don't have to look at what Gore did wrong in the campaign. Blaming Nader is akin to blaming the warning label for a product that fails."

The attacks on Mr Nader had been "ugly and self-defeating - a lot of it has been ad hominem rather than sticking to the argument". He credited Mr Nader with bringing hundreds of thousands of young people into the political process and said liberal groups should beware of alienating this progressive force by attacking Mr Nader.

Mr Nader remained cheer fully unrepentant. Although he failed to reach the 5% of the electorate that would have guaranteed the Green party federal funding in 2004, he felt that the party would grow into a significant third force and would act as a watchdog on the government.

"The fears of frightened liberals about new political parties come from a repressed es timation of their own abilities to confront tough odds - a far cry from the steel of the civil rights movement," was Mr Nader's take on the pressure he had been under from the left. Challenged at a press conference that he had helped to defeat Al Gore, he replied: "Al Gore defeated Al Gore." While he dismissed Mr Bush as a "walking corporation", he de scribed Mr Gore as an "impostor" who did not know who he was or what he stood for.

Nader voters have been angered by the implication that they would have voted for Mr Gore if Mr Nader had not run. "It's very arrogant of the Gore people to assume we would have wanted him anyway. Lots of people think he's no different from Bush," said one.